105 Women and the public space

I grew up in the fifties and was an adolescent in the sixties. My idea was that the world was standard ‘normal’ and that I was crazy. Because how was it otherwise possible that my reality did not correspond with how it should be? As a girl/woman I was supposed to have the same access to the ‘world’ as my male counterparts, but in reality that was not true. Public space was one example. Women filled the public space at will but in reality men dictated how women experienced their sojourn there. Men set the rules and behaved accordingly: self-serving. If women didn’t like how men behaved and complained about it, men were quick to tell them it was their fault. While walking her dog my mother was sexually assaulted by a boy of about thirteen. She went to the police. The police laughed at her and said she must have fantasized the incident. She was in the menopause for sure and would have ‘liked’ the attentions of a youth. As I wrote before it was a relief when in the sixties I started to travel in Muslim countries. There the dividing line between male and female space was clear. I didn’t mind to be condemned a perennial trespasser as a western woman in Muslim lands. It was better than unknowingly crossing boundaries that weren’t supposed to be there in the first place. It was only after I had read ‘The Feminine Mystique’ by Betty Friedan in my twenties that I realized that it was not me who was crazy it was the world I had to live in. Fatima Mernissi one of the most important Muslim feminists has made the definition of the boundaries set for women, the ‘Hudud’, and its hysterical enforcement by men the subject of her studies. In ‘Dreams of Trespass, tales of a Harem childhood’ she describes the source of her fascination: growing up in the strict confines of an urban Harem in Morocco.